Bird-on-Microsoft's trunk idea wins

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Donald Hastie has never met his software developers.

Some of them live in the United States and others live in Europe.

He talks to them daily on the internet via Skype and pays them upwards of $200 an hour.

He found them after an internet search and believes they are among the best in the world.

This is just one aspect of ERMLive, in which Mr Hastie is following a completely non-traditional model for the new software company

He directly employs just one staff member, uses Microsoft technology to develop software and does not chase clients.

The model must be working, if the company's growth is anything to go by.

ERMLive develops multilingual employee management systems that look after payroll, training and development, recruitment, performance management and health and safety.

This year Mr Hastie is predicting 800 per cent turnover growth, which will see it become a multimillion-dollar company. He is about to pitch for a job in New York, is in discussions with companies in Britain and has just signed his first Australian distributor.

That level of growth could have been a contributor to ERMLive being named the champion small producer/manufacturer at the Champion Canterbury 2009 business awards in September.

The award has created unbelievable demand, Mr Hastie says.

"In the last two weeks, 12 months of business has walked in."

Mr Hastie founded ERMLive in 2006, after being tossed out of PayGlobal by private equity partners the year before, after a series of disagreements.

A restraint-of-trade agreement prevented Mr Hastie from setting up another similar company within six months, so he spent that time thinking about his next venture.

He decided he needed to look for elephants.

"I wanted to be the little bird that sits on the trunk and gets carried around Africa."

Microsoft was Mr Hastie's elephant. He has embedded his system inside Microsoft, giving ERMLive almost instant credibility.

Microsoft gets a percentage of every sale Mr Hastie makes.

Having Microsoft backing could be one of the reasons Mr Hastie does not have to chase clients. They come to him. Maybe that is not surprising since one client has saved thousands of hours in staff time managing leave.

"We have decided that when people are serious about investing in transforming their HR processes then they will find us."

Mr Hastie says he wanted the firm to spend its time improving its software.

Paul Ritchie, who in 1991 was Mr Hastie's first employee, remains Mr Hastie's only staff member, but another two appointments are planned, including a business manager.

Mr Hastie outsources almost every aspect of the business, because he prefers to engage people who also work for other companies and are exposed to other challenges.

He believes plenty of people are more intelligent than he is, but no-one is more persistent or tenacious.

Mr Hastie's goal is to turn ERMLive into a $50m company selling software into 20 countries by 2015.

"We want ERMLive to be the world's payroll system."